Vertigo Sea by John Akomfrah

Abstract

The films of John Akomfrah have begun, with their recent increase in both budgets and ambitions, to seem less like artworks than research projects. The Nine Muses (2012) worked through a specific body of testimony and archive footage related to the first post-war wave of Caribbean migrants to arrive in Britain. The Stuart Hall Project and The Unfinished Conversation(2013) sorted through the facts and documents of the life and ideas of a figure important to Akomfrah's project –Hall had acted in an advisory role early on in the work of the Black Audio Film Collective, of which Akomfrah was a founding member. Peripeteia, first shown in Akomfrah's 2012 show at Carroll/Fletcher, extrapolated from two drawings by Albrecht Durer depicting black Africans a bleak, well-composed drama of dislocation.